CIENA Announces New Enterprise Customers, Adds Key Channel Partners Through Enterprise Solutions Group; Company To Showcase Enterprise Network Solutions At Storage Networking World 2003.

Business Editors

OTTAWA, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 23, 2003

CIENA(R) Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN), a leading global provider of innovative network solutions, today announced several new customers and key channel partners through its Ottawa-based Enterprise Solutions Group (ESG), the company's gateway to enterprise and reseller markets. CIENA's ESG is focused on delivering cost-effective network solutions to help enterprises gain business efficiencies for their existing networks and emerging applications.

CIENA's current ESG offerings include high-performance storage extension solutions: the CN 2000(TM) Storage Extension Platform (formerly Akara Corporation's OUSP platform) and ONLINE platforms, which enable enterprises to extend data between geographically dispersed data centers to meet business continuance and disaster recovery goals. To its growing list of enterprise customers, CIENA today added UC-Davis Medical Center, IMO, Toronto Hydro Telecom, Nielsen Media Research and Florida Power & Light Company.

In addition to selling directly to larger enterprise users, CIENA's ESG is responsible for fostering enterprise and channel partnerships and has recently added to the company's enterprise reseller channels SBC, Interactive Services Inc. (ISI), Marketex, and Unisys.

In addition, the company announced its participation in Storage Networking World 2003, October 27-30, in Orlando, Fla. CIENA also is participating in the event's Interoperability & Solutions Demo in Area 200, Solutions for Designing and Building Your Storage Network, and Area 300, Solutions for Securing and Protecting your Data.

"CIENA's ESG is focused on the growing opportunities in the enterprise market, particularly as medium and large businesses seek to maximize their existing infrastructure investments for emerging applications," said Ed Ogonek, senior vice president and general manager of CIENA's Enterprise Solutions Group, and former president and CEO of Akara Corporation. "CIENA enters the enterprise market with a strong set of solutions for storage extension, and we intend to continue expanding this portfolio with network solutions aimed at reducing costs for enterprises while ensuring network availability and reliability."

"CIENA's successful history as a leading supplier of innovative, cost-reducing network solutions facilitates a natural expansion into the enterprise channel," said Gary Smith, president and CEO of CIENA. "Our global sales and services organization, financial strength, and existing LightWorks(TM) portfolio combined with new product additions, such as the CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform, will accelerate the delivery of new enterprise solutions to customers and partners worldwide."

"According to our recent research, the storage network infrastructure market is estimated to grow at a 29 percent CAGR to $5.7 billion in 2007," said James Opfer, Ph.D., research vice president at Gartner Research. "The growth of the market for products that extend storage connectivity to enable business continuity and disaster recovery will outpace the growth of the market as a whole."

CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform

The CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform directly multiplexes data center protocols - including Fibre Channel, FICON(R), ESCON(R) and Gigabit Ethernet - into flexible SONET payloads to extend enterprises' business continuance applications over existing SONET/SDH, dark fiber or DWDM networks to deliver reliable and secure storage extension. The platform is an enterprise-ready, customer premise device with DS3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48 and SDH network connectivity, enabling enterprises to easily connect their data center equipment to carriers' ubiquitous SONET/SDH services for high-performance, cost-effective extended storage networking. The CN 2000 is seamlessly integrated into business continuance solutions with proven interoperability and qualification from leading storage vendors including EMC, IBM, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, Brocade and McDATA.

When compared to alternative solutions, the CN 2000 can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 70 percent. Specifically, the CN 2000:

-- Reduces capital expenditures by as much as 60 percent by

leveraging the enterprises' existing infrastructure with a

low-cost, high-performance storage extension platform; and

-- Reduces operational expenses through integrated data

compression and the transport of multiple business continuance

applications over different protocols on a single network

connection, resulting in up to 90 percent more efficient use

of WAN bandwidth.

ONLINE Platforms

CIENA also offers enterprises Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) solutions optimized for SAN, Ethernet, SONET/SDH and video applications. Enterprises with access to dark fiber who require multiple high-bandwidth storage, data and voice/video transport can choose CIENA's ONLINE Metro(TM) Multiservice DWDM Platform for high density metro and regional applications or the ONLINE Edge(TM) Multiservice CWDM Platform for campus or metro applications.

ABOUT CIENA

CIENA Corporation delivers innovative network solutions to the world's largest service providers, increasing the cost-efficiency of current services while enabling the creation of new carrier-class data services built upon the existing network infrastructure. Additional information about CIENA can be found at www.ciena.com.

NOTE TO INVESTORS

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions of CIENA (the Company) that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements in this release, including but not limited to the features and benefits of CIENA's products, are based on information available to the Company as of the date hereof. The Company's actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied in such forward-looking statements, due to risks and uncertainties associated with the Company's business, which include the risk factors disclosed in the Company's Report on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 21, 2003. Forward looking statements include statements regarding the Company's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward looking words such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "should," "will," and "would" or similar words. The Company assumes no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.